Los Angeles based Poor Dog Group’s Murder Ballad (1938) at REDCAT in did me in with it’s heartbreaking subtlety. When the lights came up, and ushers came into clean, I was struck heavy in my chair. My friend next to me, swore, out of lack of words. Our two sets of eyes hot and wide open.

The could feel the hairs alert like fur on the brown skin of the main performers/dancer Jessica Emmanuell. When she showed her teeth -- a wolf smile -- there was no relief, just more electricity. Emmanuel is joined by Jesse Saler, whose heavy, male, amorphous, Whiteness lands a brutal counterpoint to Emmanuel’s boney physicality and swagger. Saler embodies the ambiguous threat of a someone standing next to you at the edge of a cliff. Much of the magnetism of the second half of the performance, is feeling in the audience that either performer might, at any moment, discard their concise self-reserve.

The set design by Efren Delgadillo Jr and J.D. Bonnell -- Bonnell also the director -- has us looking down upon a large blinding white square of Marley laid centered in the black practical space of REDCAT. Behind the Marley is a false white wall made of paper standing 12 feet tall. Lighting designer Adam Haas Hunter has framed the Marley stage with tall white light bounces, creates a bouncy lightbox: overhead white light is reflected andthe white floor glows hot. Glass bottles full of water throughout the space, provide small sips of relief, their blue and green transparency, small and curvy in the clinical setting. But, when the Emmanuell and Saler use the water, and I won’t tell too much, we are already in the deep end, testing what it might feel like to drown.

Hanging above the stage is a long narrow rectangle with the lyrics, 3-7 words at a time, of Jellyroll’s infinitely and meditatively in the 1938 recording. Basic Helvetica black text on white screen. You can google this recording. It’s an tragic and epic and cruel and funny and insinuating and straightforward. Did he really just sing that? Yes, the screen says, here it is. Later, the text is disrupted and altered during fleeting blackouts. This marquee of lyrics suddenly becomes the spotlight, and also unreliable. In the projection of the lyrics, I am reminded of editorial hand of the writer of history; words form the lyrics are repeated or crossed out and an electric drone threatens to fill the sound space.

At times when the lyrics of Jelly Roll Morton's murder ballad references the murderess in prison or in a hospital; the anesthetized space wears a different meaning. The clinical-ness of an environment of exposure and inspection: the prisoner intake photograph, the fashion model on shoot, the medical oddity specimen.

Sound designer Andrew Gilbert has rigged sound from a mic, tape player, and amp downstage right. Together with technical sound design by Martin Gimenez, they create an effect whereby I lose track of when the recording is coming from the tape deck and when from the omniscient narrator stereo. It highlights the object of the recording itself, mimicking at first, gallery notes or archival annotation.

The sense of light from all directions, including the upstage white wall, pushes the performers skin tones, flesh folds, and muscle definition. The exaggeration of two different skin tones, one dark brown, one pink white, exaggerates the obvious external differences while drawing out a similarity of human experience: sweat.

Internal and external, signifier and signified, black and white, male and female, good and evil, human and animal. The exposure of the performers’ effort, their sweat, melts away at performer and performance.

Poor Dog Group: Don't think I didn't see those boogie backs. A small moment, but proof of a historical context.

Twice throughout the piece, the two performers exit the space completely. Before re-entering, they linger on the peripheral wing-space. They are seen clearly by the audience, outside the bounds of intense light. Periphery, in-betweenness, and in-visibility. Knowing the performer can leave, but rarely does, sets up a counter-tension, more complex and antagonizing, then to simply trap the character in the lit space. Saler’s entrance, midway through, is from a seat the audience. He was there all along. We are relieved the performer can leave, but our anxiety and awareness towards our fellow audience members is heightened. We are more trapped than the sleek, drenched, ferocious black performer?